Using cepstrograms to dive into the most streamed song of each album.

This cepstrogram shows Lady Gaga’s most streamed song Shallow (featuring Bradley Cooper) from the album A Star is Born soundtrack.

Lady Gaga: from her controversial *The Fame to her newest release Chromatica

Lady Gaga’s first album, The Fame, was released in August 2008 and immediately shot her to stardom. From that moment Gaga was on of the biggest artists in the world. Lady Gaga is one of the biggest pop artists in the world and is known for her musical range. After her debut album, she has released a variety of musical projects, ranging from mainstream pop to folk and jazz. I am very much

This aim of this website is to display my research on Lady Gaga’s full discography. The albums I will compare are The Fame, Born This Way, Artpop, Cheek To Cheek (with Tony Bennett), Joanne, A Star Is Born Soundtrack and Chromatica. To study the musical differences, I will first rank the albums by commercial success by looking at the Spotify streams each album has. I will then look at the musical differences of each album and conclude if there is a relationship between the the commercial success and musical elements, such as energy and valence.

Ranking all of Gaga’s albums by the amount of Spotify streams

Before studying the musical elements of Lady Gaga’s music to compare it to the commercial success, I have to rank all albums based on their success. I first calculated the total amount of streams of each album on Spotify on February 28, 2021. Then I divided this by the number of songs on the album to compare all songs equally. My ranking will therefore be based on the average streams per song on each album.

  1. A Star Is Born Soundtrack (2018)
  1. The Fame (2008)
  1. Chromatica (2020):
  1. Joanne (2016)
  1. Born This Way (2011)
  1. Artpop (2013)
  1. Cheek To Cheek (2014)

The only issue with this method of calculation is that all albums were released at different points in time, so some albums have naturally had more time to be streamed. I have not found a reliable source that provided me with data that can be fully equally compared.

How do all albums compare to each other regarding the energy and valence?

This plot shows the combined energy and valence levels of all Lady Gaga’s albums. This gives a general idea of where the energy and valence lie. I still want to figure out how to add color to the plot to distinguish each album by one color, but I have not been able to do so yet.

Comparing all albums separately by their energy levels.

This histogram shows that there is a quite a big difference in energy between all the albums. Cheek To Cheek scores quite a bit lower than Chromatica for example, which is logical because the it is a jazz record consisting of more slower, chiller songs. Chromatica, on the contrary, has only upbeat songs and scores very high on the energy ranking. This rule seems to apply for all her pop albums. Artpop, The Fame, and Born This Way score much higher than Cheek To Cheek (jazz) and A Star Is Born. Joanne is kind of a mix, because it has both low and higher energy scores. The album consists of both upbeat and slower songs, as it is a mix of pop, folk/country and rock elements.

Is there a clear and distinctive relationship between music and commerce in Gaga’s music?

I have not been able to draw a conclusion as there are more musical elements I want to compare.